Malaria

Jerry R. Balentine, DO, FACEP

Dr. Balentine received his undergraduate degree from McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland. He attended medical school at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine graduating in1983. He completed his internship at St. Joseph's Hospital in Philadelphia and his Emergency Medicine residency at Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center in the Bronx, where he served as chief resident.

Mary D. Nettleman, MD, MS, MACP

Mary D. Nettleman, MD, MS, MACP is the Chair of the Department of Medicine at Michigan State University. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt Medical School, and completed her residency in Internal Medicine and a fellowship in Infectious Diseases at Indiana University.

Malaria facts

The World Health Organization estimates that 500,000-800,000 people died of
malaria in 2010; the vast majority are young children in sub-Saharan Africa.

About 1,500 cases are diagnosed in the U.S. each year, usually in travelers returning from endemic areas.

Malaria was a serious public-health treat in the U.S. until it was eliminated during the 1920s-1940s. Much of the early work done by the CDC
focused on controlling and eliminating malaria in the U.S.

What is malaria?

Malaria is a serious, sometimes fatal, disease spread by mosquitoes and caused by a parasite.
Malaria was a significant health risk in the U.S. until it was eliminated by multiple programs in the late 1940s.
The illness presents with flu-like symptoms that include high fever and chills.

There are three necessary aspects to the malaria life cycle:

The Anophelesmosquito that carries the parasite and where the parasite starts
its life cycle

The parasite (Plasmodium) parasite has multiple subspecies, each causing
a different severity of symptoms and responding to different treatments.

The parasite first travels to a human's liver to grow and multiply. It then travels in the bloodstream and infects and destroys red blood cells.

Malaria can spread without a mosquito. This occurs rarely and is usually found in a transmission from the mother to the unborn child (congenital malaria), by blood transfusions,
or when intravenous-drug users share needles.

Malaria Prevention

Many travelers to tropical countries are concerned about the possibility of contracting malaria, a potentially fatal infection transmitted by the bite of a female Anopheles mosquito. While malaria is most common in Africa, the disease occurs in over 100 countries.